Love Songs from a Shallow Grave

Comrade, do you have many returnees from the eastern bloc coming to use your service?”
    “Returnees are our burgeoning target market, Comrade. As the number of returnees swells, I imagine in ten years we’ll have to move to larger premises.”
    “But, right now?”
    “You have to understand,” said the clerk, pointing a spindly ginseng finger at the doctor. “Not many of our brothers and sisters have returned to Laos this soon.”
    “I do understand that. I’m just interested. How many returnees do you have subscribing to say…Russian journals?”
    The clerk reached below the counter for a ledger thick as a door step. He opened the cover and flipped two or three pages. He laboured over the list for longer than necessary.
    “Four,” he said.
    “Hmm. Then I imagine the odds of two customers actually bumping into each other are quite remote.”
    “Unless they’re in the reading room at the same time.”
    “You have a reading room?”
    “A small one. But I encourage customers to use it when they’re here. I have tea in there. On occasions the odd sesame biscuit.”
    “Could I see it?”
    “Certainly.”
    The clerk walked around the counter on his long uncoordinated legs. Siri’s chin came to his solar plexus. He led the doctor to a door at the rear of the store and opened it to reveal a small windowless room which could have been the parlour of an elderly royalist. Two comfortable sofas scattered liberally with unmatching cushions bordered a large teak coffee table with a cotton doily at its centre. Resting upon that was a basket of colourful but unconvincing plastic flowers. Around the walls were large tourist posters of Moscow, Berlin, Belgrade and Prague, a handwritten sign saying ‘ WELCOME TO OUR READING ROOM ’ in eight languages, and butterflies, a lot of three-dimensional butterflies cut out of coloured paper. To one side a taller table held a tin tray with upturned cups, a sugar dish in a moat of water to discourage ants, and a large pink flowery thermos.
    Ignoring the absence of natural light and the leaning towards kitsch it was a pleasant room. Some love had gone into it, some appreciation that customers might lack a convivial place to read in their crowded dormitories. And if two customers should be here at the same time with common experiences from Europe, otherwise incompatible people might become friends. And what better place for a killer to stalk his victims?
    “Comrade,” Siri turned to the clerk who was standing uncomfortably close, “do the names Hatavan Rattanasamay, Khantaly Sisamouth, or Sunisa Simmarit mean anything to you?”
    Siri bunched his fists in hope as the man considered his question.
    “Yes,” said the clerk.
    “Which one?”
    “All of them.”
∗
    Madame Daeng’s noodle shop was fast becoming the surrogate after-hours police briefing room. While he waited for the actual police officers to arrive, Civilai stood beneath the altar Daeng had lovingly built and decorated. It was a two-storey affair attached to the main pillar of the building. It was traditional to have a spirit house outside as a boarding inn for the displaced spirits of the land, but the authorities were being finicky about residents displaying their animism blatantly in public. So Daeng had flown in the face of tradition and brought them inside. She had even dared to house them under the same roof as the ancestral shrine.
    The ancestors lived upstairs in a thirty-centimetre-square box behind a barricade of Buddhas, incense sticks, wooden elephants, Chinese and Indian deities, a half bottle of red Fanta, and Sainte-Barbe, the patron saint of firemen whom Daeng had rescued from the bin of one of the French oppressors back in the fifties. Downstairs lived the rehoused phaphoom . These spirits of the earth were unashamed capitalists. Like the poor Lao who lusted after the consumer items they heard about on Thai radio, the phaphoom were far more cooperative when bribed. A free lodging wasn’t always enough. Madame Daeng’s spirit house was straight from the high society catalogues. Inside was all the doll’s furniture she could cram into the space; a refrigerator, TV, bathtub, wardrobe, and shoe rack. Parked on a ledge in front were a toy school bus and a Mercedes Benz with diplomatic plates just in case they felt like an excursion.
    Civilai chuckled to himself. Daeng was married to a man who lived amongst spirits. Surely, with such personal contact, she could dispense with all this mumbo